Abstract

The counterfeiting of works of art of the 19th and 20th centuries is a topic with which the art scientific research, but also the features section, criminology, courts, and not least the collector himself intensively involved for years. From art forgers, some of which operate in large-scale networks and be condemned in much-publicized court case, goes from an unusual fascination. In contrast, the art forgery premodern is largely untapped. The first volume of Art History Forum Irsee devoted to the subject from antiquity to about 1800. Already the terms> forgery 'and' copy 'lack until the beginning of modernity to definitional clarity. Works of art have been forged in the pre-modern variety of reasons and copied: not necessarily the damage had been intended to be third party. Based on different forgeries in the field of printmaking, painting and arts and crafts also forging of monograms as well as the copying practice in royal collections, or the criminal aspects of the Fälschertums in the early modern period are discussed and hereby the different, sometimes hybrid varieties of plagiarism , copy and forgery as a fanned-conscious counterfeit of an original.